Saturday, 28 April 2012

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy wishes to fill its open position for an area editor in charge of Logic. The online encyclopedia has about 500,000 visitors each month from around the world. The duties of an area editor are to make decisions on whether to publish submitted articles or to ask for revisions or to reject articles. The area editor supervises the referee process, recruits two referees per article, creates and maintains a list of desired articles for the area and does some recruiting of authors.

Please contact the general editor Brad Dowden at dowden@csus.edu if you are interested or if you desire additional information.

Thursday, 19 April 2012

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation just announced that Professor Stephan Hartmann (presently at Tilburg, http://stephanhartmann.org/) will be awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship. There will be some final negotiations, but if they are successful, then Professor Hartmann will take up the chair in philosophy of science at LMU Munich and combine this with his Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship which would be the second Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship in philosophy in Munich in a row. Additionally, Stephan Hartmann and his future team in Munich will join the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Monday, 16 April 2012

Almost three years ago, I initiated the ‘Women in Logic’ list, intended to serve as source of ideas for conference organizers seeking to improve the gender balance of their conferences,in the spirit of the Gendered Conference Campaign. More generally, it was intended to increase the visibility of women working in an area that is strongly associated with men. The first draft of the list was compiled on the basis of responses to a query I had sent to the Philos-L mailing list, and since then I’ve been updating the list as I continued to receive suggestions of additions.

Now, inspired by Bryce Huebner’s wiki on feminist philosophy and Lisa Shapiro’s list of women working in history of philosophy, I decided to experiment with a new format: a Google docs spreadsheet which can be viewed and edited by anyone, so that everyone can add themselves and others. The aim is for the list to contain much more information than it did before, with names filed by geographical area/continent, information on areas of expertise and topics, webpage and email etc. In this way, it should be a much more useful tool than it has been so far, as well as being a modest attempt at data collection on the number of women working in these areas. See here for instructions on how to add names to the list, and on how to use it at a later stage.

Also, the list is now intended to cover all areas pertaining to logic: philosophy of logic, history of logic, philosophical logic, mathematical logic, computational logic etc. It is thus more inclusive than the original list. The Loriweb page will remain the main portal giving access to the list.

Of course, the most obvious downside of this format is that malicious people may sabotage the list and/or spam it with useless information. Still, I’m willing to give it a try. At any rate, if we quickly achieve a rather extensive list, then I can change the setting and make it unavailable for editing, and then take care of additions myself. (By the way, I’m on my own here, and would much appreciate it if people came forward offering to be involved in the project!)

So PLEASE pass on the info as widely as you can, add yourself to the list if you are a woman working in logic (but only those already having obtained their PhDs), and encourage all your female colleagues and friends who are logicians to add themselves to the list asap! And do let me know if you encounter technical problems while adding names to the list.

We welcome submissions of extended abstracts; see the website for further instructions. The deadline for submitting abstracts is April 15.

The conference highlights frontiers of formal and philosophical approaches to reasoning and decision making: recent developments, limitations, open questions and uncharted territory. It marks the end of a series of meetings by leading experts on theoretical and practical rationality. Invited presentations will be given by Branden Fitelson, Jeff Helzner, Simon Hutegger, Katya Tentori, and Kevin Zollman, and by many of the network participants.

Limited funding is available for contributors and for PhD students who would like to attend the conference. Please contact the organisers at RatDec2012@rug.nl if you wish to apply for funding.